Landfill seeks to reach new heights

Michael J. Mullen / Staff Photographer Trucks dump trash at Keystone Sanitary Landfill on Thursday. The landfill is located in both Throop and Dunmore.

Keystone Sanitary Landfill wants to pile garbage so high it would dwarf Lackawanna County’s tallest building.

The landfill seeks state Department of Environmental Protection permission to expand upward 220 feet from its current peak height. That would put the landfill’s eventual pinnacle 475 feet above the ground, nearly tripling Scranton’s 14-story Bank Towers, the county’s tallest building at 164 feet tall.

To those in the surrounding valley, Keystone could appear to be more like 725 feet tall in places after accounting for the terrain, which slopes upward about 250 feet from the landfill base to the proposed expansion’s highest point. That altitude is more than double the height of the 305-foot tall Statue of Liberty from the base of the pedestal to the tip of the torch.

The landfill is located in Dunmore and Throop, where residents and public officials have mixed feelings about seeing a grass-covered mountain of trash gradually poke higher and higher into the skyline.

With Keystone’s current space projected to run out within a decade, many do not want to lose the economic activity, jobs and lower cost of living hosting the state’s third busiest landfill brings.

Area residents still have to send their trash somewhere, and Throop resident Dora Casper said the boroughs might as well reap the benefits of hosting the landfill there.

Keystone employs 140 people and has an annual payroll of $8.2 million. Among a myriad of taxes and fees, it also pays Dunmore 41 cents per ton and Throop $2.02 per ton to support municipal budgets to compensate the boroughs for hosting a landfill. Landfill officials estimate payments to the two boroughs will add up to $54 million over the next decade.

The expansion would keep Keystone running nearly an additional half century, but some residents fear the aesthetic and environmental consequences of a plan to allow the landfill to grow on that scale.

Keystone’s 714-acre property includes four smaller landfills. The plan is to carve out 450 acres of that area for the expansion from large swaths of the smaller sites and the space between them — and expand skyward by sections.

When landfill officials finish piling waste in a section, they plan to seal it off, use a network of gas wells to collect methane, cover it with 2 feet of soil and plant grass over the area.

Michele Dempsey, owner of DxDempsey Architects, independently reviewed the proposal and described the approach as blending the four sites into a “mega landfill.”

Keystone is already permitted to rise another 45 feet from its current height in its southernmost landfill near the Casey Highway, meaning the expansion would rise about 175 feet from that level.

If DEP approves the expansion, only about 10 percent of the entire 450-acre expansion area would rise above the currently permitted area, said David Osborne of CECO Associates, the consultants who developed the application.

The Dunham Drive landfill would still become so tall the Federal Aviation Administration ruled Keystone must flank the mound with red, blinking lights to protect planes taking off from and landing at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport, which is 8.29 miles away.

Osborne expected the FAA to drop the requirement when consultants re-file documents with the agency because, he said, the 224 feet of clearance for low-flying planes makes the warnings unnecessary.

His firm and Dempsey each created dueling renderings from three perspectives around Dunmore to show how the expansion would look through pictures rather than just blueprint-style illustrations.

CECO’s images depict a barely visible bulge in the mountains from the Viewmont Mall, a more noticeable protrusion on the skyline from Clay Avenue in Throop and a much larger mound jutting above the horizon from Straub Street looking across Interstate 81 in Dunmore.

Dempsey argued those vantage points are from too far away and instead provided illustrations depicting a hulking green mass extending into the skyline from behind the shopping center on the O’Neill Highway, the Reeves Street bridge over I-81 and the Swinick development.

“This is literally a mountain of garbage,” the Dunmore native said. “If you are up at Viewmont Mall, it might kind of blend into the mountain because you are up a little higher looking down, but if you are anywhere in the valley, it is going to look very imposing.”

Keystone and CECO tried to address concerns about becoming an eyesore in the application.

“Due to the location of the (landfill), it does not (and will not) obscure significant visual features of the surrounding landscape to the local population,” the application states. “In large part, this is due to the facility being sited in a historically industrialized area that has been well-buffered from receptors. Further, the facility has an uninhabited, forested backdrop to the west and is largely encompassed by limited access highways.”

Dunmore resident Michael Coleman can see the landfill from his living room and was not concerned about how the appearance of the expansion — as long as it looks like a natural, grass-covered mountain.

On the other hand, fellow borough resident Christina Noldy worried about how allowing the landfill to become so large would reflect on the region to visitors.

“That is not going to make our town or our state look any better when you’re going to Scranton,” Noldy said.

kwind@timesshamrock.com, @kwindTT

kbolus@timesshamrock.com, @kbolusTT

We welcome user discussion on our site, under the following guidelines:

To comment you must first create a profile and sign-in with a verified DISQUS account or social network ID. Sign up here.

Comments in violation of the rules will be denied, and repeat violators will be banned. Please help police the community by flagging offensive comments for our moderators to review. By posting a comment, you agree to our full terms and conditions. Click here to read terms and conditions.